Category: Design and Engineering

BMW i3 i8

A recent article in the FT praised the uptake of composites, especially carbon fibre, as a material to be used for mass-produced cars. Both the author and reader’s comments were enthusiastic for the wide spread application of composites for mass production. The planet supports 8 billion people and is already carrying at least 3 billion, possibly 6 billion, too many. Each of these would like a car. Many in the west own more than one. It is estimated that the Chinese alone will buy 40 million cars by 2020. Cars are multiple reoccurring buys, car manufacturers benefit from maximising this reoccurring purchase. Vehicle obsolescence increases the number of reoccurring purchases. Obsolescence in the car industry can be as fickle as colour, style or the addition of some unnecessary new electronic gadget. Style generated obsolescence is key to mass-market consumerism. The landfill sites are full, the oceans adrift with acres of discarded plastic. When the carbon fibre car body replaces the plastic drink bottle where will we throw the waste? The FT article, the author and all of the readers comments were oblivious to the fact that man pollutes by the decisions he makes at the point of manufacture.

To cut car emissions manufacturers are keen to reduce a cars weight. Electric cars are heavy due to the batteries carried. Hybrid cars are heavier still as they carry two power sources, battery packs and fuel storage. This additional weight is partially offset by reduction in body shell weight and carbon fibre is a proposed alternative. The BMW i3 and i8 are beautiful and sophisticated pieces of engineering design. They have the wow factor that will provide a short-term lift in sales but they are simultaneously examples of irresponsible industrial design at a corporate level.

Carbon Fibre

Carbon fibre is a unique material. Its strength to weight ratio is many multiples higher than steel or aluminium. It can be moulded into many complex forms essential for efficiently distributing loads through highly stressed junctions and intersections. Carbon fibre’s place in Formula One or the aircraft industry is well earned but as a medium of mass production it is an inappropriate material.

Carbon fibre consumes 14 times the amount of energy required to make steel. More than 90% of the energy needed to manufacture carbon fibre composites is consumed in making the carbon fibre itself. 90% of carbon fibre manufacture is derived from polyacrylonitrile made from acrylonitrile, which is derived from the commodity chemicals propylene and ammonia. The process of making carbon fibre requires multiple ovens used in sequence. The first two ovens are at temperatures of 200-300 degrees C but carbonization is achieved by putting the fibres through another series of ovens ranging in temperatures from 700-800 degrees C, then 1200-1500 degrees C and finally 3450-4500 degrees C. Alongside the energy intensive heat sequence is the chemical washing, doping, catalyst forming, cleaning this with acids and ammonia. Some of the chemicals used throughout the process include dimethyl sulfoxide, dimethyl acetamide or dimethyl formamide, zinc chloride and rhodan salt, itaconic acid, sulfur dioxide acid, sulfuric acid or methylacrylic acid. These are all highly toxic pollutants that the FT article is promoting if carbon fibre is mass-produced.

At end of use carbon fibre is even more problematic as it does not biodegrade or photodegrade. – EVER – it will sit in landfill for millenniums. Carbon fibre cannot in anyway be usefully recycled. There are two ways to re-use carbon fibre one of which involves burning without oxygen (pyrolysis), but this is an intensive use of energy and produces a brittle material. The second is shredding and reusing the by-product as fill or aggregate. In both scenarios it is more expensive to recycle carbon fibre than produce it from virgin material and the recycled material is severely downgraded and has very little use, quality or properties of the original composite material.

Molluscs

Abalone is the name of a group of large sea snails or molluscs. The shell is made of nacre a composite. Nacre is composed of hexagon platelets of aragonite, calcium carbonate (chalk) glued together with proteins and polysaccharides (sugars) to form elastic biopolymers. Abalone is twice as strong as any known ceramic. Its layered composite structure prevents shearing and provides compressive and tensile strength. This shell material deforms under stress and behaves like a metal. Abalone is an accumulative secreted medium a process similar to 3D printing and this technique is perfect for fabricating complex forms. 

Nacre like all of nature’s products is manufactured at ambient temperature using readily available non life threatening materials, here sugar and chalk. 

Nature has an ordered hierarchical structure, weaving from the atomic level to the macroscopic. This repetition is applied to all scales and provides the materials unique strength.

Structures built from a molecular level up have an inherent logic that dictates what bonds to what and how. This forms a pre-coded system of self-assembly.

This coding allows nature to work with templates that are site and condition specific. It builds exactly what it needs to the specification needed. There is no waste of either time or material.

At the end of its life the Abalone returns all it has used back to the sea. Its production cycle is fully cradle to cradle.

Material scientists are still unable to replicate the process of growing perfect crystalline structures and even further away from them being applied to mass production but the direction of future production is clear. The complex forms that can be constructed from secreted natural mediums will be far superior to processed sheet materials or toxic chemical moulds.

Aluminium

Aluminium is approximately 5 times more energy intensive than steel to produce although this only adds 15% to the cost of production over steel. Car manufacturing in aluminium requires additional tooling with increased complexity throughout the production process and this adds a total of 60%, including raw material production, over the cost of producing steel cars. However aluminium is 100% recyclable, it does not downgrade through the recycling process and uses 95% less energy to recycle than to produce from bauxite. Aluminium also weighs a third of steel. Complex shell moulding and bonding techniques can provide all of the protection and crumple zones required in a modern car. Aluminium can also be 3D printed to create complex crumple zones. There are many advantages in using aluminium for mass production including, availability, lightweight, corrosion resistance and the ability to recycle without downgrading. The additional cost of aluminium over steel is offset by efficient life cycle use and as aluminium an inherent high raw commodity value at the point of recycling.

Until we are able to understand how to build cars in a similar way that nature constructs the mollusc, from the molecular level up all at ambient temperature, aluminium is the transition medium of choice to be used for lighter mass produced cars just as gas is the transition medium as we move from coal to solar.

The Surrogate Twin. 

Mans obsession with flight goes back millennium from the mythological Icarus who unfortunately flew too near to the sun, to the flying machines of Leonardo Da Vinci. The Montgolfier Brothers first took to the skies in a hot air balloon in 1785 and the first successful parachute jump was made by Jacques Garnerin in 1797. These were men who’s ideas were ahead of their times and ahead of the capabilities of available technology. At the turn of the twentieth century technology had caught up and the ascent to flight was tackled in earnest.

Many early flying machines were driven by little more than the belief in an idea. There were those that flapped, beat, whisked and scooped at the air hoping to gain lift. Many a full size craft were built too quickly following a sketch with almost no development testing and brave men died trying to prove their invention. Early on two approaches developed scientifically, one from box kites and the other from gliders. The box kite approach culminated in Alberto Santos Dumont’s tail first box kite of 1906. The glider approach rigorously researched by the Wright Brothers with first flight achieved in 1903. Some of the early flying machines have an exquisite beauty and fragility being as delicate as a dragonfly wing. 

The work of the Wright Brothers shows the clarity of their problem solving technique and is a lesson in strategy for all designers. Aspects of flight are isolated and first resolved independently, slowly and methodically and over time each component is then assembled into a working whole, a total aircraft. There are four main aspects that are tackled scientifically. Lift, pitch, roll and yaw. Early work focussed on lift with flying glider wings over Kitty Hawk beach. The beach had constant winds and these would aid the experiments. A bi-wing tethered to the ground hangs motionless in the air as wind moves through it. Once the understanding of lift had been accomplished the control over each of the three axis of movement was undertaken. A front rudder was developed to control pitch, a rear tail to control yaw and wing warping to control roll. 

The design inspiration for control of roll famously comes to Wilbur Wright whilst selling a bike inner tube in the brother’s bike store. As the inner tube was taken from the box Wilber notice that by holding the end corners of the box on opposing diagonals he could squeeze and twist the length of the box. On a bi-plane a similar technique could be used to wing warp and create roll. To test the idea the Wright Brothers built a bi-winged model glider with a short stabilising tail. By attaching strings to the wing tips top and bottom they could warp the wings and roll the craft from left to right. The Wright Brothers understood the concepts of the centre of gravity and balance, moving the front rudder, responsible for pitch. If too near to the main wings this made the craft too responsive and when further away less responsive but more stable. This would have been very similar to their work on bicycles, for example when shortening or lengthening the front forks with regard to steering. The Wright Brothers built wind tunnels and studied the effects of moving small weights across a frame. They made small incremental changes to their designs and tested and recorded the consequences of each. The work was hands on intuitive and methodically logged and appraised. This approach formed the foundation for understanding controlled flight.

It is interesting to note the conceptual simplicity of the Wright Brothers approach to flight and of The Wright Flyer of 1903. This is that the plane is a glider with an engine and that flight is achieved with the engine pushing or pulling the glider through the air in one direction, forwards. The plane is not a humming bird, a bat, a falcon or a dragonfly and has none of the manoeuvrability of any of these. This conceptual simplicity of a glider with an engine is still very much relevant today and covers most aircraft. The skills of the humming bird, bat, falcon or a dragonfly are still beyond our technology but recent experiments with computer controlled drone flight should soon be transferable to responsive aircraft. With recent advances in robotics and AI, vertical take off and landing (VTOL) craft that are emissions free, autonomous, computer controlled and have a radically simplified interface, may soon be an option for the everyday commute. 

Of all of mans great technological achievements from the invention of the wheel onwards few had the impact of mans conquest of the sky. Flight shrunk the world by linking isolated cultures, opened up new trade routes and added another horrific dimension to warfare. The very first flying machines were only achieved one lifetime ago. In 1903 Wilbur and Orville Wright flew just over 36m in 12 seconds at a speed of 10.9 km per hour, whilst by 1976 the record aircraft speed had increased to 3530 km per hour and manned rocket speed to 8281 km per hour. 

The exponential curve of mans technological progress is well known but needs to be forever re-quantified to give context to the ever increasing speed of change. At ten million years ago man first uses tools, he learns to control fire 1-2 million years ago, he first wears clothes around 50000 years ago, begins agriculture 11000 years ago, first uses iron 6000 years ago, invents the wheel 5500 years ago, invents paper 2000 years ago, invents gunpowder 1100 years ago, eyeglasses 1000 years ago, printing 500 years ago, telescopes, mechanised farming, steam engines, all arrive 300 years ago, electricity, radio, food preservation, early medicine, 200 years ago. Mass produced cars, washing machines, TVs, refrigerators 90 years ago, nuclear power 70 years ago, satellites, lasers and computers 50 years ago, CD’s, mp3s and the world wide web 30 years ago, cell phones and touch screens 10 years ago. 

From the point where man first used tools it took a further 10 million years just to learn to get dressed. Technological development was graphically almost horizontal for a further 50000 years with most of mans technical innovation happening in the last 100 years. This is the Law of Accelerating Returns. The speed of change has left our social and political systems behind, our education systems are woefully inadequate and we are all ill prepared for what is about to happen next with the coming of AI (Artificial Intelligence). Every innovation that man has made to date has been a tool that he could control to carry out a specific task whether that has been a flint axe, an aircraft, a computer or new medicinal drugs. This is about to change.

Mans closest evolutionary cousin is the chimpanzee. On equal weight terms the chimpanzee is twice as strong as a human. The only reason that man dominates chimpanzees is due to his superior intellect. This intellect has allowed man to become the dominant species on the planet. With the invention of AI man will build a self-learning silicon based machine that will be his intellectual superior. This will be the first tool that man has built that will have the ability to supersede his own knowledge. It will also be the first time that mankind has not been the superior intellect on this planet. 

Technological innovation is driven by communication. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century had minimal effect on mankind as the distribution and understanding of knowledge was limited. It was not until the twentieth century with the inventions of flight, TV and telephone that the distribution of knowledge and the reciprocal progress in technological invention took off.

Sci-Fi’s depiction of the future provides interesting analogies. The character Iron Man, from the films based on the Marvel comics, designs his new inventions through polite conversation with J.A.R.V.I.S. his super AI computer. The superior intellect of Tony Stark (Iron Man) instructs the computer to perform certain tasks en route to designing some new innovation. It is a one sided dialogue between man and his servant the machine. In reality it is far more likely that Tony Stark would not be instructing J.A.R.V.I.S. but instead trying to keep up with J.A.R.V.I.S. Tony Stark would be asking what have you just done, can you explain that again, lets start from the beginning and please break it down into small steps so that my carbon based organic brain can comprehend. Pseudo science has often been inspired by the popular press, the sci-fi comics of yesteryear or the science fiction films of today. The difference is that the science fiction films today are so well academically researched and politically connected that many of their projections are very credible. J.A.R.V.I.S. as trusted ally will always be a subject of conjecture.

The popular conception of AI is of something in human form such as the Terminator, Ex-Machina or the robots of Jonathan Nolan’s Westworld. Mankind has spent much of the last 30 years developing and integrating the worldwide web. Over 40% of the planet can now wirelessly connect to the web with that figure rising to 75% in most of the developed world. We have spent the same amount of time creating a global and logistic world. The planet is run by systems and AI will be a system, a controlling network. As an innovation AI is no longer a prosthetic device, the tool as an extension of ourselves but instead due to the global net it is an extension of our relationships to all connected others. The cloud becomes a stream of shared consciousness.

There are three states of AI. 

ANI or Narrow AI. This has specific skills in one subject.

AGI or General AI. This has developed human equivalent skills across all subjects.

ASI or Super intelligent AI. This exceeds human intelligence.

Once AGI has been reached it will self learn and redesign itself at such speed that it would soon be way beyond the powers of human comprehension.

The world already runs numerous ANI systems, Google ‘Search’, Amazon ‘you also might like’, Facebook friends, Siri, numerous apps and chat bots, high frequency financial trading, logistics firms, management firms. ANI are used to increase efficiency, they generally lie dormant until asked to perform some specific task. ANI are already part of an intrinsic network within our world. AGI would quickly interconnect all of the existing ANI systems to make one whole controllable network, it would then use that data to self improve and develop. It is estimated that we will have full AGI by 2025 – 40, within nine to twenty four years. Reaching AGI is hard to forecast as development is exponential but once AGI is reached and all existing ANI system are absorbed they would then all be self learning and self improving systems. One estimate suggests that it will take a decade for a computer to reach the human equivalent of a four year old, another hour to be of Einstein’s equivalent and another hour and a half to be 200,000 times more intelligent than all humans. We still mistakenly think of the computer as a single object and of a smarter computer as a larger more powerful single object but that is not how an intelligent computer would allocate resources. ASI would split its learning tasks to numerous computers around the planet and collectively share that information as it grows creating a whole series of development and feedback loops. There is no finite limit known on the level of possible intelligence but what is certain is that this organisation will be an ecosystem and not a humanoid object. Mankind has never before confronted a superior intellect and no one can truly guess the outcome of that conversation. Conversations are based upon values and who can guess what values AI would hold? Even objectivity needs a starting premise.

At the beginning of this text the intent was to compare AI with our first explorations in flight but this now seems inappropriate. Anthropologically personal computers could be compared to flight, both came out of the garage workshop and yet had global life changing consequences; both open up new cultural exchanges whilst simultaneously shrinking the world; both evolved with incredible technological speed; both will be remembered as part of the list of key events that shaped mankind. AI moves way beyond this and is more comparable to the space exploration we have yet to undertake, a very large unknown indeed. What is similar to the days of early flight is that it is driven by lot of hope, belief, trust and blind faith and recalls the day man first stepped off of the cliff and into a head wind hoping to spend time with the birds. There is still a lot to learn from the slow incremental approach of the Wright Brothers where risk is minimised and each step recorded.

The commercialisation of the Internet over the last 20 years has seen a disproportional consolidation of wealth and power into the hands of an ever-decreasing minority. This same minority own the large R&D workshops developing AI. Whoever controls AI will also control all of the patents produced from AI including an increasing number of medical and biological patents. At the same time more and more jobs will be automated meaning wealth consolidation and wealth disparity will also move along an exponential trajectory adding further to existing social problems. 

Images:The Wright Brothers test an early glider at Kitty Hawk beach, Louis Bieriot’s XI monoplane 1909.

The Surrogate Twin

In September 1994 I began a lecture at UCL with two images shown side by side. One image was of a male body builder, his huge arms crossed in front of acres of chest. The other image was of a female ballet dancer standing on one pointe with her other leg reaching into the air way above her head. It was an introduction to a talk on ‘Extreme Climates and Responsive Systems’ and the analogy represented by the images was immediate. The body builder represented the machines of the Industrial Revolution and the ballet dancer the machines that we needed today. The ballet dancer was fuel efficient, had a high power to weight ratio, had uniform strength throughout a full range of movement, used biomechanics over brute force, had coordination and could interact with other complex movement patterns, could be choreographed to work as part of a complex integrated team, could adapt quickly to a range of landscapes and environments. More importantly the ballet dancer was female as Gaia is female and very much part of a circular system. Biomechanics and circular systems would be the inspiration for the next decades work on ever more delicate machines that responded to the harsher climates of our planet.

We jump forward twenty years and robots are at last coming to a department store near you. Robots have been a recurring Sci-Fi topic for hundreds of years from earliest automata’s of the Renaissance to early twentieth century films such as Metropolis. The 1950’s saw a new push for automated friends and assistants as American directors popularised science fiction with films such as Forbidden Planet and The Day The Earth Stood Still. Many visions of the future from these films had man and robot working together but the realities of reaching this goal have proved a little more difficult to resolve. The computing age has made vast strides forward in the development of robotics. The seamless link between hardware and software has until now been allusive. Many early robots were simply machines doing automated repetitive tasks. The next generation will be robots that can multi-task and make elementary decision upon those tasks i.e. how to pick things up, how much pressure to apply, how to balance, how and where to put things down, how quickly to move, how to avoid obstacles etc. The majority of funded research explores aspects of one or more of these tasks i.e. Boston Dynamics location based environmental sensors, balance and balance correction. Others such as Pepper and Erica explore the interface of man and machine with their emotive recognition and responsive robots.

A lot of these projects are still based on pattern recognition and the ability to churn through huge quantities of data instantaneously. We have come a long way since Alan Turing’s work but the majority of modern robots are still Turing machines albeit very sophisticated ones. AI will enable robots to learn and this will improve their ability to make decisions. In many ways this will still be data crunching and statistical analysis but all done at such speed that it would seem like a conscience decision expressed by a piece of hardware, the robot. The Tech firms are throwing huge budgets at this. Facebook recently set up Building 8 to work on hardware that can utilise its software and data harvested from its billions of users. As early simple products come to market the revenues generated will head straight back to the R&D departments for use on the next big project. The process will snowball and progress will be quick and its progression logarithmic. This is all happening now and the journey is well underway. Facebook’s ten-year roadmap may well be reached in six.

A kangaroo can travel huge distances with great economical efficiency at cruise speeds that average 20 kph (12 mph). Kangaroos can, when required reach speeds of up to 65 kph (40 mph). When travelling at speed the Kangaroos huge tail works as a whipping counterbalance to the head and body. This forms a pendulum motion over the hips where head and tail move up and down in unison helping to create lift. The Kangaroos rear legs have elasticated tendons that stretch from the back of the knee to the underside of the toe. The tendon is stretched over an exaggerated and lengthened heal. The tendon is an energy storage mechanism. It recycles the energy used upon landing and stores it in the elasticated tendon. The heal adds leverage to the storage system. Approximately 50% of kangaroos jump makes use of this recycled energy with the rear legs powerful muscles providing the remainder. A kangaroo increases its momentum not by increasing the speed at which its hops but instead by increasing the length of each stride. In this way, combined with its recycled energy, the kangaroo uses almost the same amount of energy at whatever speed it travels. This soft biomechanical motion is a fluid integration of total body movement and will be very difficult to replicate with a machine.

Festo is a multi national that makes hydraulic and pneumatic components for industry. Festo has an R&D department that uses its technologies to experiment with biomorphic machines. This R&D is mainly used as both training for its young engineers and marketing for its products and as such presents a conflict of interest between marketing and research. Machines here are made to resemble animals and they may have some attributes of that animal but resemblance dominates. For example the Bionic Kangaroo (their name, I’ll call it a RooBot) has the plastic body of a kangaroo with a plastic tail but it is a hopping machine. It could be a frog or it could be a fluffy white cloud. The RooBot like the kangaroo has an elastic tendon but this does not recycle energy as does the kangaroos, its energy is pre loaded by a standard pneumatic cylinder DNSU fed by a high pressure storage unit and a valve. The RooBot’s tail and head are plastic add-ons that do nothing other than suggest form. The RooBot can hop, it can turn and it can balance all very commendable achievements but this is not M.I.T. Media Labs. The RooBot is a sophisticated marketing toy posing as research and here is the dilemma. Although one is aware that marketing of existing products dominates the research into biomorphics Festo’s R&D has still produced some incredibly poetic pieces. The Air Mantra is an exquisite art piece and shoals of them ‘swim’ the galleries of the world. The Festo engineers have produced other mechanical fish that have the same mesmerising beauty and the RooBot suggests very similar potentials.

So what is the point of this meandering text? The film Blade Runner (adapted from Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electronic Sheep) was set in Los Angeles 2019, three years from now. So somehow within the next three years we have to move on from the RooBot to the Nexus 6 perfect Replicant, unlikely indeed. However, what all these pieces do is reaffirm just how incredible and unique the biological perfection that exists on our planet is and how much we have to learn from all nature that surround us.

If I had wish for one superpower it would be for immortality just to be able to watch this fantastic journey unfold.        

The Surrogate Twin